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Thursday, June 23, 2011

How do you consume wargaming media?

With so much media available on the webs about Warhammer, Warhammer40k and Warmachine, how do you bring it all in? How do you separate the signal from the noise? How do you manage to read or listen to everything?

I'm going to provide a simple explanation of how I manage all my RSS feeds and podcasts and then if you don't mind, throw in the comments how you do it.

The first thing I learned to use to organize my life was Google homepage. Also known as iGoogle. This page allows you to setup how you see everything; your gmail, your calendar, RSS feeds, Google Reader, etc. Pardon me while I whip this (huge image) out:

Click to see bigger

So you can see on the left side I have my gmail, then my calendar (notice all my nerd events, and then my wife keeps track of every person we've ever met's birthday). Twitter goes in the middle (tons of good stuff to follow on there - I'll have a list in the next post I do). On the right is a Google Reader pane.

In the Google Reader pane are the latest posts from every RSS feed I have setup in Google Reader. I have them setup in groups; News, Sports, Gaming, Comics, etc. This allows me to choose each one from the dropdown and see it in the pane.

So how do I get these RSS feeds in my reader? When you're on a webpage, say this webpage, there should be an RSS icon at the top in Firefox.

If you click this button, it will take you to a screen where you can choose how to subscribe. Choose Google and you can then select Reader and now you'll have an RSS feed for that in your Google Reader.

Once you have it in your reader, if you log into Google Reader you'll see a list of all your subs. You can edit them and create folders etc. Here is part of my list:

RSS feeds with new articles show up in bold.

This pulls the RSS feeds into your iGoogle as well. You can also install the Google Reader app on your phone so you can read articles while you're waiting. Google Reader has allowed me to organize myself so much better when it comes to blogs; it is really easy to read everything or even mark something as read if you're not interested.

There are tons of podcasts available for each chosen wargame. I have listened to quite a few. I'll make recommendations in the next post. What I'll post here is a different way to listen to podcasts; most people use iTunes and their iPod or iPad or iPhone or iLife or whatever. iTunes is bloatware, so I don't have that on any of my machines. I choose to use Google Reader to manage my podcasts.

The first thing to do is install Google Listen on your phone. One caveat: this program seems to be out of support from Google and can be buggy sometimes. The payoff when you get to use it to listen to podcasts is definitely worth it, though!

To subscribe to a podcast using Google Reader, do the same method by going to the RSS feed for the podcast then subscribing to it. Once you get to Reader, make sure you move the podcast RSS to your Google Listen folder. Then start up your phone, go to Listen, go to My Listen Items, and hit Refresh. It will download all the header information for each episode that is new. You can then click into each episode and download them individually.

This is a great way to listen to podcasts and manage all your content. I use it in my car during my 45 minute commute each day.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings. How do you manage the blogs, podcasts, even forums you read?